Making the UI less fiddly...

[bradr]

Hi everyone,

One thing that I've never been happy with is the need to constantly resize the panels on Cantabile's main window to get everything arranged just right.

This morning it occurred to me that this could be much improved by simply replacing the scrollbars inside those panels with a single scrollbar outside. Each panel would still be collapsible but when expanded would always grow to show it's entire content. A single scroll bar covering routings, triggers, media players and racks/plugins would allow scrolling when it doesn't all fit.

The large status and keyboard panels would be left as fixed panels.

What do you think? Any other ideas for how to make things less fiddly?

Brad

[TiUser]

One thing I remember having suggested a time ago was "magnetic" behaviour when moving or dragging windows.

Maybe your suggestion to have only one scroll bar for the list type panels is a good idea.

But probably exclude the plugins edit panel from that too...

edit: Maybe you can add a little button in the lower right corner of the panel when the horizontal scrollbar appears to grow it up to the needed size...?

[bradr]

I've made an experimental build with this change in it. If you'd like to try it there are screen shots and download links available from blog (see my signature). I've not decided whether to roll it into the official build but probably will as I think it's much better.

[koalaboy]

Another method may be to use tabs, similar to those at the top - a second layer of tabs at the top of what is the scroll-area in the blog screenshot, with one tab for each 'section'.

The downside to this is if you need to see two sections on the screen at once, but I wouldn't like to say if it's a common scenario or not.

The main problem with 'one big scrollbar' is that when it gets full with lots of items, navigation is annoying. Grouping everything together into one area is only really of benefit if you generally need to see all those things at once and while collapsible sections can help, it's whether they're more often expanded or collapsed that should determine this.

Aperture uses a similar 'one big scroll' for the 'edit' menu, and it sometimes works but sometimes has me scrolling up and down constantly to find the entry I want. 3DStudio Max used an interesting combination of tabs and multiple sections, which I was never sure which I preferred.

If you do go for a single scroll, it would be nice to be able to grab the window and drag it to scroll, and also have some 'quick' navigation method to get to a specific section.

(I'm not a Cantabile user whatsoever - I just program GUIs at work - and so I may be stating the obvious or things that are already in Cantabile)

[TiUser]

Hi Brad,

I've tried it and think one scroll bar is better.

What about a "min width" setting or a "width to fit" button in the lower right corner when the vertical bar appears?

Or maybe just restrict to a min size here?

edit: @koalaboy: interesting idea with the tabs.

[bradr]

Thanks everyone for your feedback.

I've merged this into the official build now and it's in build 2043 (available now). I also did some work so that up/down arrow keys work across the panels and also added support for mouse wheel on the scroll views, plus some other misc fine tuning.

The tabs is an interesting idea. I actually wanted to add this when I added the ability to maximize the panels. The idea was you maximize a panel and tabs automagically appear at the top. I never got around to it though.

Given that I don't have the maximize buttons on the panels anymore I'm not sure how that fits now, but will keep it in mind.

Brad